lunes, 25 de septiembre de 2017

“Existing data, while not systematic, indicate GBHs and metabolites
are widely present in the global soybean system and that human exposures
to GBHs are clearly rising,” the study
authors wrote, in their conclusions. “Tolerable daily intakes for
glyphosate in the US and Germany are based upon outdated science.

“Taken together, these conclusions all indicate that a fresh and
independent examination of GBH toxicity should be undertaken, and that
this re-examination be accompanied by systematic efforts by relevant
agencies to monitor GBH levels in people and in the food supply, none of
which are occurring today. The US National Toxicology Program should
prioritize a thorough toxicological assessment of the multiple pathways
now identified as potentially vulnerable to GBHs.

“The urgency of
such work was reinforced in March 2015 when the IARC [International
Agency for Research on Cancer, World Health Organization] concluded
glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen,” the study authors conclude.

Endless US aggression in Afghanistan has nothing to do with combating
terrorism (America supports it), everything to do with controlling the
country, using it for oil and gas
pipelines, part of encircling Russia and China with US military bases,
and plundering vast Afghan mineral riches – likely worth trillions of
dollars, a prize corporate predators covet.

WikiLeaks’ latest release from the Vault 7 series of CIA leaks,
sheds more light on how ordinary people can be easily tracked and
targeted by the US intelligence agency through everyday electronic
devices.

Since
March 7, WikiLeaks has revealed CIA hacking techniques used to weaponize
mobile phones, conduct surveillance via smart TVs, and load and execute
malware on a ‘target machine’.

In
light of Thursday’s 20th release from Vault 7, RT looks back at the
most explosive revelations from the CIA’s hacking arsenal, showing how
the intelligence agency could spy on you in your own home.

Home Security Systems

The
‘Dumbo’ program is purportedly designed to manipulate home security
systems, altering the functionality of webcams and microphones on
Microsoft Windows-operating systems and corrupting video recordings.

WikiLeaks
suggested that this allows the operator to create fake – or destroy
real – evidence of their intrusion into the device.

« Wikileaks
says the leaked ‘Vault 7’ documents came from within the CIA, which has
in turn refused to confirm their authenticity. Previous releases
include details on CIA hacking tools used to weaponize mobile phones,
compromise smart TVs and the ability to trojan the Apple OS. »

« The firm, PETER-SERVICE, offers software and hardware solutions to
communications providers. Its products manage traffic, bill customers,
store and analyze metadata, and provide other services a company with a
large customer base may need. »

Rosneft revealed that it was in negotiations with the government of
Iraqi Kurdistan to construct a pipeline in the region by 2019 and then
begin exporting gas to Turkey and the EU
year later, thereby shedding some light on what the government-owned
Russian company had in mind when it signed a major deal with the
autonomous region in June during the Saint Petersburg International
Economic Forum. [ 516 more words ]

Donald Trump is sending more troops to
Afghanistan, continuing the USA’s longest war. CEO Michael Silver, of
the American Elements corporation, wrote a short op-ed in the Wall
Street Journal, urging for the extraction of the country’s mineral
resources. Afghanistan remains unstable. Many questions must be asked.
The one on many minds is “Why is the USA in Afghanistan?”

Terrorism? Minerals? Or Something Else?

The USA has been occupying Afghanistan
since 2001. Why? Both supporters and opponents of US Afghan policy give
murky answers. Supporters of US efforts say they are in the country to
fight terrorism and help the country rebuild and move toward democracy.
Opponents of the occupation say the USA is seeking to control its rare
minerals such as neodymium, indium, gallium, and lanthanum which are
essential in making computer chips.

These answers are insufficient. As for
terrorism, since 2001, the presence and strength of terrorist groups in
Afghanistan has vastly increased. Al-Queda, ISIS, various warlords,
Jundallah, and many terrorist groups, most of which had minimal presence
under the Taliban government, are now all across the country. Even the
Taliban itself, the government the USA toppled in the 2001 invasion, has
not vanished, and still controls a large portion of the country. If the
USA is in Afghanistan to fight terrorism, its efforts have not only
completely failed, and but had the opposite of their intended affect.https://journal-neo.org/2017/09/18/why-is-the-usa-in-afghanistan-an-answer-to-the-big-question/

On September 18, Moscow hosted the third international scientific
conference on the South China Sea, organized by the Institute of
Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy
of Sciences. This was a milestone for the international scientific
forum, which brought together prominent geopolitical experts studying
this region from such states as the UK, Singapore, Australia, India and
even Mexico. The discussion held at the forum centered around the tangle
of contradictions existing in the South China Sea region, with experts
trying to propose a road map that would lead to mutual peace and
cooperation.

ANTHONY BELLCHAMBERS: Netanyahu is determined to persuade Trump to try
to scupper the nuclear deal with the Iranian state that was negotiated
by the United States, the United
Kingdom, Russia, Germany, France, China and the European Union and
brokered, in 2015, in order to facilitate peace in the Middle East and
the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. Israel, of course, is the
only undeclared nuclear weapons state in the world having secretly built
up an arsenal of up to 400 nuclear warheads – enough to destroy the
entire Middle East and Europe.

U.S. President Donald Trump recently signed a determination that
singles out Venezuela for failing to adhere to counternarcotics
obligations. The accusation came – perhaps not so coincidentally – on
the same day that Venezuela declared it will no longer participate in
the U.S.’ petrodollar trade system.

With German Chancellor Merkel expected to win reelection on Sunday, the
European elites may celebrate having turned back a populist surge, but
their neo-liberal policies continue to fuel discontent, says Andrew
Spannaus.

ANTHONY BELLCHAMBERS: It is seriously complicated by the fact that the
Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is determined to shift the
global spotlight away from Israel’s
massive, covert, nuclear weapons program to that of Iran which, of
course, has no nuclear weapons whatsoever but which is a party to the
NPT and, furthermore, subject to inspection by the IAEA.

Both Russia and China have been buying up huge quantities of gold for
some time now. Russia’s present gold reserves would back 27 percent of
the narrow ruble money supply – far in
excess of any other major country. The United States’ Federal Reserve
admitted years ago that they haven’t held any gold for a very long time.

Special Report: Six years after the U.S. helped “moderate rebels”
overthrow Muammar Gaddafi, Libya has gone from enjoying the highest
standard of living in Africa to a failed
state where live human auctioning for sex slavery is out in the open in
Libya, where groups like ISIS have overrun the nation.

Gaddafi used state money to offer a variety of popular services
including free electricity, interest-free loans, grants to newlyweds,
legal rights to housing, maternity bonuses for new mothers, free
education, 50-percent subsidies on new car purchases and free
healthcare. The country’s literacy rate also rose from 25 to 87 percent
during his time as its leader. In addition, Gaddafi nationalized Libya’s
central bank and kept Libya free of external debt.

Gaddafi
committed a cardinal sin in the lead-up to his assassination – not
against the Libyan people, but against the hegemony of the U.S. dollar.
In the early 2000s, Gaddafi had saved up a large amount of gold and
planned to introduce a gold-backed pan-African currency based on the
Libyan dinar in order to restore economic strength to a continent
besieged by neocolonialism. He had planned to start selling Libyan oil
using the dinar before the 2011 invasion, a move that would have
challenged the petrodollar system – an agreement negotiated in the 1970s
where OPEC nations sell their oil in dollars in order to create
artificial demand for the currency.

Special report: Eight years into the deepest economic depression that
an industrialized country has ever experienced, we are now being told
that Greece is a “success story.” Having
accepted the “bitter medicine” prescribed by the “troika”—the European
Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary
Fund—the storyline today is that Greece is on the road to recovery,
firmly within the European Union and the eurozone.

This narrative was recently echoed by Greek Prime Minister Alexis
Tsipras in his annual speech at the Thessaloniki Trade Fair, Greece’s
equivalent to the State of the Union address. In this speech, Tsipras
triumphantly declared that talk of “Grexit”—or a Greek departure from
the eurozone and the EU—has been replaced by that of “Grinvest.”

Within such a context, there is seemingly no room for discussions about
whether it is in Greece’s best interest, even after so many years of
implementing the troika’s austerity diktats, to consider a departure
from the eurozone and the EU. Indeed, the narrative is that the people
of Greece overwhelmingly have never supported the prospect of “Grexit.”

« I thought about the “decency” and “good faith” when recalling my
own first experiences as a young reporter in Vietnam: watching
hypnotically as the skin fell off
Napalmed peasant children like old parchment, and the ladders of bombs
that left trees petrified and festooned with human flesh. General
William Westmoreland, the American commander, referred to people as
“termites”. »

Corporate Europe Observatori

Huge splash in the Guardian and many other outlets this morning on glyphosate.

The European Food Safety Authority’s (EFSA) final assessment report,
which the European Commission uses to justify its proposal to reautorise
glyphosate for 10 years in the EU, has largely been copy-pasted from an
industry report.

Copy-pasted!

The original lines stem from an industry report which the pesticide
lobby group Glyphosate Task Force submitted to the agency as part of the
normal procedure – but the EU agency hardly changed a word!

One
of the most scandalous features: EFSA adopted the pesticide industry’s
analysis of the available independent scientific literature, which
dismissed the significance of all the results finding harm. Having
assessed the very same independent studies, the World Health
Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer came to the
exact opposite conclusion: they considered glyphosate a likely
carcinogen.

The urgent need to reform the EU’s pesticides
assessment system could hardly be made clearer than by the
ever-expanding glyphosate scandal. Not relying on industry’s studies and
interpretations of independent data would be a good first step,
wouldn’t it?

Exclusive:
President Trump’s U.N. speech showed that despite his America First
rhetoric, his policies are virtually the same as the neocon strategies
of George W. Bush and liberal interventionism of Barack Obama, says
Robert Parry.

Paul Craig Roberts:
The Great American Democracy, The Morally Pure Country, is actually a
cover for the profits and power of the military/security complex. What
is exceptional about America is the size of the corruption and evil in
the government and in the private interest groups that control the
government.

Exclusive: The PBS 10-part Vietnam War series offers valuable insights into the horrific conflict but still treads lightly on U.S. leaders’ guilt as they lied and connived to start and extend the slaughter, as war correspondent Don North describes.

By Don North

Vietnamese-American author Viet Thanh Nguyen observed in his 2016 book, Nothing Ever Dies, that “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” That is surely true of the Vietnam War, which – although it ended four decades ago – continues as a battle of memory, history and truth.

The US base may also be used to launch air sorties to defend Israel’s
recent illegal annexation of the part of the Golan Heights, land which
it has managed to take under the cover
of the Syrian conflict. Recently, Israel has managed to pry away this
contested land from Syria with the help of Al Nusra terrorists on the
ground, after they previously chased out UNDOF Peacekeepers which had
been positioned there since 1974. Amazingly, the UN still has not
updated its website to express this new reality on the ground (still
showing a mission photo from 2012).

What happens when Hollywood Hillary-supporters join up with spooks and
neocons to make propaganda? The "Committee to Investigate Russia" is
born and it trots out washed up old
Morgan Freeman to blabber on about how the US has been attacked by
Russia and we are at war! Will this crude, McCarthyite propaganda stick?
Or will Americans laugh at the foolishness of out-of-touch celebrities
joining together with the likes of David "Axis of Evil" Frum and Max
"let's have a war now" Boot?

(ANTIMEDIA) Since the end of August, calamitous hurricanes have dominated the news cycle. From Harvey to Irma to Maria, which grew from
a Category 1 to a Category 5 storm in just half a day, many people want
to stay informed about the struggle and damage these natural disasters
are leaving in their wake.

Unsurprisingly, the media’s obsessive focus on the disasters has not only jarred some
residents trying to keep their families safe — it has also allowed
other important developments to remain on the back burner.

Though these other stories have received some degree of attention in
mainstream narratives, they haven’t received the extensive coverage they
deserve. Here are five vital developments from the past few weeks that
have taken a backseat to the drama and destruction of hurricanes:................

#Catalonia#referendum: #Spain steps up raids to halt votehttp://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41331152 Spanish police have detained 14 Catalan officials and raided regional government ministries involved in organising an independence vote declared illegal by Spain's government. Tensions were already high before Josep Maria Jové, number two in the Catalan vice-presidency, and others were held.

Thousands of Catalans took to the streets in protest and the region's
president complained of a power grab. Spanish Prime Minister Mariano
Rajoy said the state had been forced to act. The region's separatist
government is defying an order by Spain's Constitutional Court to
suspend the 1 October referendum law passed by the Catalan parliament
last month.

A sea of protesters filled the Gran Via and other streets as police searched the Catalan economy ministry

By Carey Gillam

Three years ago this month Monsanto executives realized they had a big problem on their hands.

It was September 2014 and the company's top-selling chemical, the weed killer called glyphosate that is the foundation for Monsanto's branded Roundup
products, had been selected as one among a handful of pesticides to
undergo scrutiny by the World Health Organization's International Agency
for Research on Cancer (IARC). Monsanto had spent decades fending off
concerns about the safety of glyphosate and decrying scientific research
indicating the chemical might cause cancer or other diseases. And even
though the IARC review was still months away, Monsanto's own scientists
knew what the outcome would likely be—and they knew it wouldn't be good.

Internal company records show not just the level of
fear Monsanto had over the impending review, but notably that company
officials fully expected IARC scientists would find at least some cancer
connections to glyphosate. Company scientists discussed the
"vulnerability" that surrounded their efforts to defend glyphosate amid
multiple unfavorable research findings in studies of people and animals
exposed to the weed killer. In addition to epidemiology studies, "we
also have potential vulnerabilities in the other areas that IARC will
consider, namely, exposure, genetox and mode of action…" a Monsanto
scientist wrote in October 2014.
That same email discussed a need to find allies and arrange funding for
a "fight"—all months before the IARC meeting in March 2015.

And
Monsanto predicted internally before IARC even met that the review of
the scientific evidence would result in a decision that glyphosate
"possibly" was carcinogenic or "probably" was. Monsanto officials had
forecast the IARC decision in an internal "preparedness" plan
that warned colleagues to "assume and prepare for the outcome..." The
document shows Monsanto thought it most likely that IARC would peg
glyphosate as a "possible human carcinogen." The rating of probable
carcinogen was "possible but less likely," the Monsanto memo stated.
IARC ultimately did classify glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic to humans."

As
the IARC meeting loomed, the internal documents show that Monsanto did
not wait for the actual IARC decision before acting. It enlisted teams
of PR and lobbying experts, scientists and others in a plan aimed at
creating what was designed to appear as a storm of "outcry" and
"outrage" to follow the IARC classification. IARC had a history of
"questionable and politically charged rulings," the Monsanto memo said.